The standard narrative of musicology has always been that Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) was the key reformer of opera history, who swept away the conventions of "opera seria" as they had congealed in the libretti of Metastasio, who purged operatic music of "recitativo secco" and the monumental repetitiveness of the da capo aria, who put those flashy ornamentalizing singers in their proper place of subordination to the composer, and who set the table for the symphonic operas of Wagner. However, as is often true, the accepted wisdom leaves a lot out of account. It's a long century from Gluck to Wagner, during which da capo and bel canto continued to thrive and the libretti of Metastasio were set to music as eagerly as Gluck himself had done both before and after his "reforms" in Vienna in the 1760s. Gluck's best pupil turned out to be Antonio Salieri, that backward-looking composer of opera buffa. Haydn's and Paisiello's operas show little response to Gluck's concerns. Mozart composed one patently Gluckian opera -- Idomeneo in 1780/81 -- using an Italian adaptation of a French libretto from 1712. It's an atypically static drama (with lovely music of course) that has never competed for stage time with Mozart's comic and tragicomic masterpieces. Over the next several generations of composers, only the Medea of Cherubini mimics the intensity of Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride.Meanwhile, with the successful revival of operas of Lully and Rameau, by conductors and singers of HIPP persuasion, we mere listeners have a perspective on Gluck that the academic musicologists never had. We can hear how obviously Gluck found his musical idiom in the French Baroque tradition. Not just the language of the two Iphigenies is French; the style of recitation, the fluidity of sequencing from recitation to aria (including da capo), and indeed the whole affect of the opera is best heard as the culmination of that French tradition. Gluck himself knew as much when he hastened from Vienna to Paris in the 1770s.The libretto for Iphigenie en Aulide (1774) is closer to the drama by Racine than to Homer, while the libretto for Iphigenie en Tauride (1779) is based on a French text derived from Euripedes. The conclusion of the former is not entirely consistent with the premise of the latter; nonetheless, staging the two works together is a brilliant idea. "Aulide" ends poorly and unconvincingly as a dramatic statement but the psycho-mythic intensity of "Tauride" redeems it. Likewise, the music of Tauride is so monumental and memorable that Aulide sounds like a preface, just as the first act of Berlioz's "Les Troyens," in Troy, becomes a warm-up for the latter action in Carthage. Berlioz is far more aptly recognized than Wagner as the great-grandchild of Gluck.This tandem production was first staged in Amsterdam by De Nederlandse OPera in September 2011, using the same set and many of the same costumes for both. It's a brutally 'modern' set composed of steel scaffolding and stairs on either side of a stage that stands behind the always-visible orchestra. Was the audience distributed fore and aft? And the chorus? As in ancient Greek theater, the chorus takes the secondary role of an audience of commenters. The costumes are brutal also. Ugly! Military drab, camouflage colors, beribboned uniforms for officers, lots of machine guns and even a suicide vest! Calchas, in the first opera, is patently a "commissar" of a police state. Thoas, the king of the Scythians in Tauride, is a blood-lusting sadist with a sexually charged dominance his priestess Iphigenie. I can hear the wails of outrage from opera fans committed to "traditional" stagings. But what tradition is there? Baroque operas based on Greek and Roman sources were NOT staged in togas or with classical nudity! Would a staging of Tauride in powdered wigs and 18th C greatcoats seem less anachronistic? How else could a stage director - in this case the redoubtable Pierre Audi - achieve the emotional impact of Opera Seria except by shrouding it with the context of tyranny and warfare? Hey, the Trojan War was nasty business! And this is Gluck with guts!The musical values of these performances are equally gutsy. Conductor Marc Minkowski coaxes every bit of energy and pathos from the orchestral scores. His Tauride is musically far more ferocious than the older Zurich performance on DVD conducted by Bill Christie, though that also was exquisite.Christoph Williabald Gluck - Iphigenie en Tauride / Galstian, Gilfry, van der Walt, Christie, Guth (Opernhaus Zurich) Minkowski's Tauride could really be heard as a harbinger of Wagner. But the glory of both operas is the singing. In Aulide, it's the musical tension of Nicolas Testé as Agamemnon, the heroic tenor of Frederic Antoun as Achille, the the smooth virtuosity of Veronique Gens as Iphigenie. Tauride belongs to the guys: Jean-François Lapointe as Oreste and Yann Beiron as Pylade. Their dialogue recitatives and their duets are emotionally captivating as well as superbly sung. (It's worth recalling that self-sacrificing friendship had been the theme of the many settings of the libretto L'Olimpiade by Metastasio, which Gluck must have known well.) The only weakness in this performance - visually and musically - is the Diane, sung by Salomé Haller. It's a small role vocally, one that could be sung by many, so I have to wonder why a more majestic Diana could not have been selected, or why some trappings of majesty could not have been lent to poor Haller, who looks more like a grouchy housewife than an almighty Goddess.I've never before been as entranced by Gluck - on stage, on CD, on DVD - as by this double whammy of a production. Makes me want to say "Ahh! Now I get it! What matters wasn't his role as a reformer but rather the genius of his music."